These Accidents of Faith
by WhenLighteningStrikes
Summary: Mostly he doesn't look for deeper meanings. Post DH: oneshot.


_a/n Wow, long time since I've been here. Merry Christmas y'all :)  
__Warning: This is confusing. Like seriously wtf-is-happening confusing. Don't read it if that bothers you.  
__Disclaimer: Yep, mine. I just wrote the actual books that way because everyone knows that writing fanfics to right canon wrongs is always more soul-satisfying._

* * *

He doesn't really understand.

It's as if one day he wakes up and her hair is brown. A definite sort of brown, like maybe if he hadn't been so busy saving the world, he'd have read more, and his dictionary would actually have had another word for it. All that he knows right now is that it's browner than Ginny's hair is red and…

(…fuck, was that supposed to happen?)

* * *

He sits five feet, nine inches away from her at all times. He's memorized the pattern of the tiles in the Burrow, till he knows exactly how many lines he has to leave to fit the minimum exact distance to resist her force of gravity. It's stronger than most, he's noticed. There's really no reason for it, expect that he knows if he moves closer, his other best friend pulls her onto his lap as a symbol of... something ...that probably lots of scholars have researched on and he knows nothing about.

And there are times when he's lying in bed looking at the Marauder's Map and their dots just converge and he wonders whether she's just sitting on his lap as usual, because it's hard to imagine _her _in any other situation that could possibly cause this convergence. Not that girl with the loose robes and heavy books in her hand who'd told once him that there were more important things in life than books and cleverness.

And there are nights when his dreams supply those missing images. Nights when his whole world explodes into technicolor beneath his close eye lids and he wakes up in the middle of winter, sweating. Her hair is still brown but Ron has jet black hair and green eyes like his mother's, and oddly enough doesn't look like Ron at all.

He shoves the map in the uppermost corner of his cupboard and doesn't look at it again.

* * *

She always comes to him when she's lonely. It's just something he knows. Like he knows that Ginny's beautiful and that Ron would have given his life up for him if he had had to. He doesn't look for deeper meanings because he's not that guy.

It's when she's heard about the death of this girl in the war. They don't even give her name, just a blurred picture among thousands of the same kind, with a poetic heading that doesn't mean anything because words never do mean anything when her hair is so brown and the girl she brought her first bra with is dead.

Or the day she realizes that strong memory charms aren't completely reversible and her mother gives her this bright trusting look because she's the perfect daughter and calls her Hermia.

"At least they're both from Shakespeare," he says matter-of-factly, (watching your closest friends lying lifeless on the ground in the aftermath of the beautiful green light does that to you) and then she's hitting him with entirely too much strength, and because there are times when she's reduced to the elements of blood and skin, and it actually hurts but he won't tell her (because he's the Boy Who Lived. They have books about him. He doesn't _hurt, _obviously).

"You're bruised," she tells him, when she's exhausted and they're both just lying there, breathing, "I'm sorry, Harry. I'm so, so sorr…"

And _then _she starts crying because how dare her vocabulary and her magic fail her on the same day?

* * *

"They're alliterative," she tells him. Ginny and Ron aren't home and he's standing close enough to touch (but not touching, that's important).

"What?"

"Our names."

He looks at her not looking at him, "What does that mean?"

She shakes a little with silent laughter, half bent over her bakery book, and he hears it clearly in his head because that's how fucked up he is, "Nothing, really."

And he doesn't know what it means but the world's still spinning so maybe it's not important enough (but she's got flour on her face and her eyes are sparkling and as she swipes her hand, he gets her flour on his face and when he thinks about it, that might be the only thing important enough).

* * *

It's as if one day he wakes up and her hair is brown. And a year later he's marrying the girl with the red hair, the beautiful one whom he…he… really cares about.

And she's with the boy with the red hair, her husband, who looks like his new bride, and he feels his heart clench and it hurts a little, not as much as his body does when she's hitting him, but just a little.

And then she looks at him from across the room that the world is in (it's Harry Potter's wedding, he's Harry-fucking-Potter) he doesn't breathe for a moment, because he knows she's holding hers.

(Maybe that's alliteration).

* * *

And as all four of them are standing together and he's five feet two inches away from her (that's too close to her gravity), he notices her eyes are brown too, and he understands this time because although he was saving the world while they were teaching grammar at Hogwarts, he's always had an excellent vocabulary for four-lettered words.

* * *

**Fin.**

**Yes, the four-letter word IS love. I didn't want to say it in the fic, but just in case it was hard to understand.**


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